Michael Barone: 2012 Is Very Different from Kerry vs. Bush

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner.

Does the 2012 campaign look a lot like the 2004 campaign? Many Democrats think so.

And there are some resemblances. As in 2004, current polling suggests a close race and shows only about a dozen states in contention.

As was the case in 2004, the incumbent has been running negative ads against the challenger, hoping to disqualify him the same way that Bill Clinton disqualified Bob Dole in 1996. Many Democrats think that Barack Obama’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s business career will have the same effect that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads had, they believe, on John Kerry in 2004.

But, as William Galston of the Brookings Institution, an alumnus of the Clinton White House, writes in The New Republic, “The evidence in favor of all these propositions is remarkably thin.”..